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Dark Matter Fools Us Yet Again
We just can’t figure out dark matter. It solves a lot of cosmological mysteries, yet it continues to elude some of our best predictions.
Dark matter gets its name because it doesn’t interact with electromagnetic fields, meaning it doesn’t produce or reflect light. Though we can’t detect it directly, astrophysicists are fairly certain it exists due to its gravitational influence. Even back in 1884, Lord Kelvin looked at the velocity of stars near the center of the Milky Way and knew their speeds couldn’t be explained by only visible matter. He reasoned that the vast majority of the matter in our galaxy was invisible. Since then, the evidence for dark matter has piled up. Today astrophysicists use it to explain everything from the rotation of galaxies to the makeup of the cosmic microwave background, as dark matter’s gravitational pull seems to be the missing piece of the puzzle. In fact, the consensus is that it comprises roughly 85% of the universe’s matter, though we still struggle to explain what it’s made of.
The problem, though, is that dark matter doesn’t always exist where it should. For example, a team of astrophysicists from the University of Bonn and the University of Saint Andrews published a study in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in which…
